They probably wouldn't thank me for describing it thus, but the Institute of Contemporary Arts, that venerably progressive temple to the creative on the Mall in London, is about to launch a kind of Twitter – for art.

Art Rules is a new platform for online conversation about what art is, isn't and should be; about how best to make art and survive as an artist; about what to aspire to, read, or avoid like the plague.

The makers of this new platform, which launches this month, hope it will become many other things too, as conversations and discussions spiral off from one another and users take over the debate. They also want it to be a place where artists, curators, critics and the public can converse on equal terms.

What it shares with Twitter is a tight limit on character-count (a punishing 100 maximum, compared with Twitter's 140). Like Twitter it also allows users to link to long-form articles or images or different online resources, to deepen the conversation beyond the clipped confines of a single sentence. In the style of Facebook, you can "agree with" or "disagree with" different propositions.

Malcolm Poynton, a former council member of the ICA, has developed the platform in his role as chief creative officer of the design and technology agency Sapient Nitro. He said the aim is "world domination. Nothing short of." Less ambitiously (but not much less) it is for the platform to be "genuinely at the centre of the conversation about the contemporary arts".

Gregor Muir, ICA director, talks about drawing a younger, digitally aware audience into a conversation about art that has traditionally occurred within the London institution through its live discussions and events. The ICA's role has always been as an innovator and provocateur, he says. "It would look odd in five years' time if we weren't doing something like this."

Before the site – artrules.ica.org.uk – goes live to the public on 21 August, there has been a testing phase. Artists, curators, writers and other pals of the ICA have been invited to submit their "art rules", which already appear on a not-yet-public version of the platform. (Still in development, it looks less linear than Twitter, and its flow is horizontal, where Twitter is vertical).

Jeremy Deller's rule is to "throw away the rulebook" and there are a number of injunctions along those lines; it seems obvious that you can't be an artist by following rules. (Or is it? There are plenty of unspoken rules lying around in the art world that everyone tacitly follows – many to do with the social structures around "being an artist" and entering the sacred portals of the British art world.)

Some offerings are rather poetic – such as Caroline Rooney's enigmatic "art's line is the coastline". Some are philosophical: David Quantick suggests that "art is an egg's idea of things that aren't eggs". One or two are frankly terrifying, such as James Scroggs's maniacally capitalised claim that "IT OFFERS CLUES TO HELP US CONQUER".

Some are pragmatic. Painter Dexter Dalwood advises "patience – no one remembers a late release date: everyone remembers a bad album". Lucky PDF, the London artists' collective, offers "Don't work for free". That one has already proved popular.

On Tuesday evening, in good old analogue fashion, the ICA organised a real-life get-together of artists, curators, writers and other interested parties to debate some of the propositions put forward. Two large screens were mounted on the wall: one showing the Art Rules site, the other Twitter, where #WhatisArt is the hashtag in play.

The evening was hosted by the irrepressibly effervescent art writer Louisa Buck, who invited various people who had submitted rules to come up on to the stage to explain themselves. Curator Paul Peroni offered his wisdom: "Protect Ya Neck" [sic] is his rule. "It's all about how to keep alive in the vipers' pit that is the art world. It's fucking horrible most of the time."

Freire Barnes, a writer, suggested that one should "make art like Shakespeare wrote plays – for everyone". Cue a host of objections: why should artists be responsible for audience reaction? Doesn't this just lead to awful bland pap? Isn't this anyway a platitudinous way of describing Shakespeare? (You can see how, if done without the civilising influence of real bodies in space, these debates might get rather bloody.) Some brave soul steps in to suggest, gently, that "considering people doesn't actually make you a bad artist".

The proof of all this will be in the using. You might argue that Twitter was doing this kind of job perfectly well without the ICA creating its own platform, though Poynton argues that there's less debate about art on Twitter than there might be (it's true that there's more interesting discussion, at least in my experience, around other disciplines, such as theatre). Either way, there's no way of knowing till it's out there. As one rule put it: "No one cares what you do, even whether you do it not, until you have done it."

• This article was amended on 5 August 2013. An earlier version placed the Institute of Contemporary Arts on Pall Mall. It is on the Mall.